Welcome to this last newsletter of 2006. In this newsletter we discuss Search Engine Optimisation, Paid for Advertising and SPAM. We also provide some information regarding changes to our hosting and maintenance service.
Owning a website is a bit like owning a shop down an alleyway just off from the main shopping precinct – unless you market yourself, many of your prospective customers will never walk through your door.
It is very easy to fall for the sales patter that comes from Search Engine Optimisation ‘experts’ who will promise you top position on search engine results in exchange for the profits you’ve not yet earned.
But what is Search
Engine Optimisation? SEO, as it is known, is the practice of getting your
site to the top of the search engines and like many things there are fair and
foul means to do this. Foul means include mini sites acting as doorways to your
site, using multiple domain names, keyword stuffed pages, repeated content
across multiple pages, hidden text and a multitude of other practices which may
give short term results but could get your site dropped completely.
SEO is not an exact science; in fact many of the largest search engine operators (esp Google) actively try to prevent SEO activities by constantly revising their search engine ranking criteria. The effect being that activities to optimise your website placement which work today may not work tomorrow and those that positively affect one search engine may adversely affect another.
How to get better
natural search engine placement - recognised SEO techniques which increase
the importance of your standing in the web community can help to ensure fair
placement in search engine results. There
are 4 stages to SEO:
1. Identifying your current placement and ensuring that your site is submitted to all relevant search engines is a basic requirement.
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You can do this manually or we can check and report
upon your websites inclusion/exclusion in top
- Register your site – many search engines allow you to manually register your website address. But be warned, most do not like repeated registrations. Software is available which offers to do this manually for you across 1,000s of search engines but of course the majority of these search engines are not used widely or are bogus collection points for spam and are best avoided.
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Often an inbound
link from a ranked site is the only way to get included in some search engines.
2. Optimise your site’s
content - it is worth taking time to understand how prospective clients search
for your product or service. A short cut to this knowledge is to research your successful
competitors:
- Review your top competitors sites, and identify top search keywords/phrases for your service.
- Identify variants of these terms e.g. Buckinghamshire Widget Supplier. The internet is now so large with so many established websites that you can’t realistically expect to rank top for a well used keyword.
- Verify that searchers actually search on your chosen phrase – there is no point being the topped rank site for something which nobody ever searches for.
- Update your site’s meta tags (including any image alt tags) to include your identified top search terms.
- Conduct a keyword density analysis of all/or selected pages of your website against your key phrases and revise your page content to include your identified top search phrases and so increase your keyword density – you are trying to obtain a similar density of use as your successfully ranking competitor’s website.
- Conduct a review of your site content and a comparison against successful competitors to identify and suggest general content revision opportunities.
- For larger sites maximise the ease of indexing of your individual website pages through the creation of an xml site map and it’s submission to Google site maps. See example at http://www.lamtha2.co.uk/sitemap.xml
- For dynamic websites such as shopping carts, the majority of product pages are generated from a database and this can result in some search engines excluding your pages. We can undertake a review of your listings and in some cases apply a modification to generate a search engine friendly url for each page.
3. Reciprocal Linking - they say that on the internet ‘content is king’ - sites which are the ‘subject authority’ are the sites that get the highest ranking on the search engines.
But how do the search engines identify the subject authorities? Simply by measuring a site’s ‘page ranking’. Page ranking is s system devised by Google to measure a site’s importance based upon the number and quality of other websites who link to that site. Reciprocal linking is the main influence and a link to your site can be considered a ‘vote for’ your site. If respected websites ‘vote for’ you by lining to you then the search engines will consider your site a subject authority and rank you highly in their results.
It should be borne in mind though that not all votes for you are positive; inclusion in some directories and link farms can actually count against you. A ‘vote for you’ from your best competitor is considered to be highly prized.
Getting good quality reciprocal links is very time consuming however it is worth the effort. You can take two approaches to get inbound links; either fill your site with content so that others will want to refer their site visitors to or actively seek out reciprocal link partnerships. Once again checking out your competition is a good place to start – anyone who links to them will probably consider linking to you.
If you do nothing else, make sure you secure some quality inbound
links.
4. Measuring the results & repeat - SEO is not an exact science and positive results cannot be guaranteed. However, results can be measured so before and after the completion of any SEO activities record your website’s search engine placement for your keywords/phrases and measure the effect of any changes made. SEO is not a one off activity so keep a watch on the competition and adjust your website content accordingly.
If SEO sounds just like too much hassle and after all why would Google et al give you consistent top placement in their results for free when they have advertising places to sell?
Apart from the multitude of websites out there which will happily take your advertising budget consider using Overture or Google Adwords. Between them they sell top search engine result positions for all the major search engines. If you have an ecommerce site you can even measure the result of advertising this way in terms of site visitors converted to order value.
Don’t forget that like a bricks and mortar store there is no substitute for paid for advertising; be it via a flyer, an advert in the local paper or trade journal, or some form of online advertising.
As a website owner your email address shares your domain name which makes you easy prey for spam. Spammers know they can always get you by using easily identifiable email addresses such as enquiry@yourdomain.co.uk. They also know that many small business email addresses are catch-alls so anything@yourdomain.co.uk gets forwarded to a single mailbox and this again makes guessing your email address very unchallenging.
So how do you fight back? The first step is to contact your email provider and get them to turn on spam filtering. Often this just adds the word SPAM to the email header so you need to also setup your email client (Outlook) to filter any emails with SPAM in the subject line and dump them into a folder which you can periodically check before you delete them.
The second thing to do is to install a second spam filter into your email client. A good personal spam filter which is also available as a free version is SpamFighter – www.spamfighter.com. SpamFighter includes a block button which allows all it’s users to keep their spam database up to date - if multiple users identify a sender as a spammer then their database gets updated. In this way SpamFighter is one of the more effective free spam filters.
There are also a few of things you should never do; firstly never reply to spam – it just confirms you email address is active and you’ll get more. Try to identify and delete spam email without reading them. When you read the email your email address is confirmed to the sender. Likewise turn off Outlook’s preview pane – it acknowledges receipt as soon as the email is previewed.
If after doing these steps you’re still plagued by spam then consider requesting that your catch-all email address be turned off and stick to a single email address for your domain. It’s not as convenient to send and receive everything via a single address but it may be your only option to get on top of your spam problem.
We will soon be introducing revised hosting & maintenance services. Until now we have offered a basic hosting service which provides for a nominal amount of maintenance per month for minor content updates. This service is to remain and will be our ‘Standard’ hosting package. On top of our ‘Standard’ hosting we will be offering a ‘Premium’ hosting package.
Why the change?
All websites are built and operated by using a combination of technologies (HTML, CSS, site visitor’s browser, Flash animation, scripting e.g. javascript, PHP etc). These technologies are used to provide a variety of elements from visual presentation of the pages to user interactivity to contact forms and shopping carts.
The technologies do not stand still and whilst many retain backward compatibility there is a possibility that future versions will not. In some cases the technology may even become obsolete. The result is that over a period of time all websites will degrade; this may affect the visual elements and/or functionality of the website. In severe cases the websites functionality may stop.
Our current ‘Standard’ hosting service reflects our cost for hosting your website, traffic costs, email services and minor changes. It does not take into account the considerable work that may be required when Microsoft issues a Windows update or updates Internet Explorer (both of which recently affected Flash animation within websites). It also does not take into account the costs we incur to re-purchase, re-install and test scripts/shopping carts when server side scripts are updated.
What we are doing
By offering a Premium hosting service we will offer our clients the option of peace of mind for future technology changes. At the time of contract renewal we will assess each site individually and offer a revised hosting fee which reflects the possibility of dealing with future disruptive technology changes.
What if I do nothing?
Clients who elect to remain on ‘Standard’ hosting will of course be able to commission us on a case by case basis to resolve any unforeseen issues.
Until next time, have a merry Christmas.
Lamtha2 Web Solutions
Tel: 01296 768 237
Email: enquiry@lamtha2.com
Web: www.lamtha2.com